Hi Super Sioux, as a matter of interest I have interviewed Ian Darby about his Fleet Air Arm career and he went into some great detail of the shoot down and time as a POW. Ian was the first ever Observer to escape from a doomed Firefly by parachute alive, he said it was a very tricky aircraft to get out of due to hitting the tail, and so he and his pilot Burn O’Neill had practiced a possible technique they devised just in case the worst happened. When it did happen, they employed that technique and it worked. Ian and Burn were captured, and went through various places before ending up in a POW camp at Yokohama, where they were placed into the same hut as US pilot Greg ‘Pappy’ Boyington.
I’d be interested to know the serial and code of Ian and Burn’s aircraft too. I didn’t get the opportunity to see Ian’s logbook sadly. A great bloke though, very interesting to talk with. At the time I met and interviewed him in October 2009 Burn O’Neill was also alive, and I’d hoped to try to get to interview him too. But sadly he was very ill and within weeks he died.
Lynx, many thanks for that. I got the same answer on another forum I posted this request on. I’m now satisfied thanks to that answer that Glen McBride’s aircraft was coded as 273/S.
The only question mark that remains is whether it carried any nose art or nicknames on the Firefly but we will likely never know that now unless a photo of their plane shows up. i have several shots of Glen McBride from Ian’s album as they joined, trained and served together, and were shot down on the same raid.
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